The reality of the rise of an intolerant and radical left on campus [link]

Fact-checking can’t do much when people’s ‘dueling facts’ are driven by values instead of knowledge [link]

Faculty at prestigious institutions are more productive and prominent than their peers. New research suggests that their work environment, not their training, explains their success. http://ow.ly/GfY450tWGum

Expertise, agreement and the nature of social scientific facts: Against Epistocracy. “I reject any attempt, on the part of scientists themselves or of philosophers or any other students of science, to strengthen the role of experts in society. Experts need to be kept in check, not given more power.” [link]

311 responses to “Week in review – science edition”

There is a cell in the Coral Sea that is of no great significance – likely an eddy in winds and currents reflected off New Zealand in the southern season of storms spiraling off Antarctica, You show it below. And it is unclear what significance you attach to it.

I think we already know… no matter what the data says, AGW-faithful will continue to believe in a 1:1 cause and effect relationship, over time so, errors in estimates are irrelevant in the short term.

Look as hard as you may for a long as you will and with as jaundiced and biased an eye as you please toward facts that justify Western academia’s belief in AGW (human-caused global warming) and still there is no adequate explanation for decades of relative quiescence in every meaningful metric of, weather. These are halcyon days compared to life in the LIA (Little Ice Age).

If there has been warming or if there has not been warming is not a question.

We all know, from data and history, we have warmed naturally. They would have us believe there is a new climate equilibrium temperature that is the new normal. The hockey stick was created to prove cycles have not happened for ten thousand years. We all know that past cycles were real and natural and enough of us believe that is still true, we elected Trump to stomp out the new lies.

We just came out of the Little Ice Age, climate has come out of all past ice ages. Climate comes out of ice ages into warm periods, those warm periods have little cycles of warming and cooling for many years before climate descends into the next ice age.

We are warm now because we are supposed to be warm now. We will not get much warmer or colder for several hundred years, with some goodly variations in warm and cool. Then, like it or not, we will descend into a colder period for several hundred years. We do not suddenly have a control knob that stopped natural causes and internal responses of the climate system.

That does not matter, they are all well inside the errors in calculating the average temperature of the whole earth.

They scare people to tax and control them and they must convince people they do know how to determine future climate. They have proved they really know nothing, but they twist everything and the media promotes their version. This is really, really, sick stuff.

“That the ice sheet could retreat beyond where it is today, in a climate that was likely quite a bit colder than today, points to extraordinary sensitivity,” says Robert DeConto, a glaciologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who was not involved in the research.

This shows how little climate scientists understand actual data. Yes Antarctic ice always flows and dumps into the oceans and when oceans are warm and thawed, it rebuilds the ice. We came out of the last major age. Antarctic ice was flowing and helping with the cold with reflecting and thawing ice. Earth warmed because the NH finally thawed most of the great ice sheets and started sea level rise. The rising oceans took ice away from Antarctic until it warmed enough to start evaporation and snowfall rebuilding of the ice about 10 to 12 thousand years ago. At ten thousand years ago, there was less solar into the SH and more in the NH. At that time, the SH needed less ice and the NH needed more ice to maintain the new balance. Over the recent ten thousand years, the solar in has moved from the NH to the SH. The ice requirements in the SH grew and the ice available grew. The ice requirements in the NH decreased and the ice available decreased. These ice supplies in each Polar Region are self correcting.

It is natural cycles and we do not cause them!

In a colder time, there is less evaporation and snowfall and ice on land depletes. In a warmer time, there is more evaporation and snowfall and ice on land is replenished. Ice Core Data does show that this is true.

Climate people, hard to call them scientists when they do not understand simple facts from data, add ice when oceans are frozen and it is not snowing. they remove ice when oceans are thawed and it is snowing.
Data shows that climate does the opposite.

The Alarmists are in control and they are rewriting History and changing data. Too many people who do know History are a major threat to the new order. They must be removed from the educational system.

In a recent meeting with a school administrator, he was told that individual funders were all looking to fund STEM programs—and, Blight said, “It’s the funders that drive things.”

And the top item on the funders agenda is world control and they must scare people to get them to hand over money and control.

They want the power to fix and control everything handed over to the UN. More funding for education that does not hinder their agenda and no funding for education that teaches history about the many times that leaders were totally wrong.

When making things better only makes them worse, aka the Law of Unintended Consequences. Tim Newman’s take on the 737 Max disasters: a focus on non-core disciplines. http://www.desertsun.co.uk/blog/9608/

This is a really good paper, a must read. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
I feel that the author’s understate the effect from the tropical latitudes during summer. 2007, 2012 and 2016 are testiment. The massive transfer of energy from ocean to atmosphere in the lower latitudes has a profound influence globally, it is the primary driver of climate and weather.
Regards
Martin Cropp

“How strong is influence of the tropics and midlatitudes on the Arctic atmospheric circulation and climate change? https://buff.ly/2GxvmJu

This only discusses atmosphere. Most of the energy in the oceans does come from the sun and mostly in the tropics and midlatitudes. The temperatures of the water in the ocean currents that travel to the polar regions determine if the oceans are cold enough to be covered by sea ice or warm enough to be exposed for evaporation and cause of precipitation.

When oceans are warmer, it snows more in polar regions, when oceans are colder, it snows less in polar regions. This regulates the ice sequestered on the land and ice volume and weight regulates flow rate and the regulates ice extent and thaw rates. The atmosphere responds to the ocean conditions. The most energy is stored in the oceans and in the ice,

In the coming years as they discuss the impending move of the capital from Jakarta, I wonder how many MSM stories will mention that North Jakarta’s subsidence rate is 250mm/yr and put that into perspective by providing the GMSLR of 3.2mm/yr in the article. I suspect not many.

Apparently discussions were started in 1945 about such a move. Bangkok has subsidence issues as well. In spite of knowing the geological properties of the region for the last 100 years, they continue to build 50+ story skyscrapers. Over 100 of them have been built in the last 25 years.

I was stationed in Bangkok 50 years ago. There was evidence everywhere that the Venice of the East had a problem. Do the engineers know something I don’t know so they won’t be proposing such a move for their city in 2100.

I noticed the passage of HR 9 on the Berkeley Law page – while looking at the socialism vs. private ownership post – an odd dichotomy with arbitrary criteria. Primarily that wind and solar are environmentally friendlier. Which system is friendlier depends on regional politics it seems to the author. Might it not be that with capitalism man exploits man – in socialism it’s the other way around?

“If you believe, as do I and so many Evangelical communities, that this planet is God’s creation and we have a moral responsibility to be good stewards of it, then you would be sure to be a good steward and sign up for Climate Action Now.

It is about your Paris commitment to reduce CO2-equivalent emissions by 26-28%. The withdrawal from which always seemed more grandiloquent posturing – who would have expected that from your president – than a practical necessity. You are halfway there through fracking supplied gas. Some of the rest is efficiency and productivity – which is what China and India committed to. You are growing more trees and socking away carbon in soils. Something else you can thank your farmers for. After the dustbowl government and farmers invented new ways of land management to prevent soil loss and to restore productivity and ecological integrity. It is happening today more urgently than ever across plains, forests and wetlands.

I did get a new terminology out of this post – pre and post tax subsidies. Pre-tax subsidies were about $300 billion in 2017 according to the IEA – all or near enough outside the G20.

Post-tax subsidies are off with the fairies. But there is progress to be made there as well with the CO2-e that are not the 25% CO2-e emissions from electricity and 14% from transport. These are pollutants of concern that have large climate impacts. Again led by the developed world. Only rich economies can afford environments.

I’m with Nancy on this. It is God’s world and it belongs to the future. And succor against these risks today is consistent with classic liberal principles of freedom in the great society of Friedrich Hayek. The principle applies equally to acts of humanity and their impacts on the health of the planet and people.

“To the same category belongs also the increase of security through the state’s rendering assistance to the victims of such ‘acts of God’ as earthquakes and floods. Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken.”

If conservatives had the sense God gave them they would want to steer this boat.

“The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 1974 Prize for Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Professor Gunnar Myrdal and Professor Friedrich von Hayek for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.”

Hayek’s monetary theory is the foundation of all well managed free markets in the world today. He is the author of ‘The Road to Serfdom” – an inevitable outcome of centralized economic planning. But you don’t know this. You have a simple opposition to a phantasm of global warning alarmism and no commitment to or even recognition of Enlightenment principles of free peoples.

“When I say that the conservative lacks principles, I do not mean to suggest that he lacks moral conviction. The typical conservative is indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is that he has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike. There are many values of the conservative which appeal to me more than those of the socialists; yet for a liberal the importance he personally attaches to specific goals is no sufficient justification for forcing others to serve them. ” F. A. Hayek – The Constitution of Liberty

But as I said to you yesterday – this is a war you are losing. I would suggest that a little more political pragmatism and a firmer grasp of classic liberal enlightenment principles – on which the US was founded – is in order rather than accusing me of wanting to steal peoples money..

There is a fun theological argument here, which I describe as Stewardship versus Dominion. Stewardship suggests that humans and nature are two separate entities, perhaps of equal value. both belonging to God. Dominion suggests that humans own nature, which accords with property law. The Greens like stewardship, perhaps even preferring nature to humans in the equation, but dominion is closer to reality.

So I reject the whole concept of stewardship. We are owners, not caretakers.

Is there a practical distinction to be made rather than semantic? What do we want for the future?“

It isn’t enough to repair the damage our progress has brought. It is also not enough to manage our risks and be more shock-resistant. Now is not only the time to course correct and be more resilient. It is a time to imagine what we can generate for the world. Not only can we work to minimize our footprint but we can also create positive handprints. It is time to strive for a world that thrives.” Jean Russell

The difference between stewardship and ownership is far from semantic under the law. It is fundamental, which is precisely my point. You might think on this a bit, as I have done. The stewardship doctrine is deeply false.

There was great enthusiasm from warmers when Pope Francis played ball and published his deeply flawed encyclical Laudato Si, (coached by Schellnhuber et al).
Now Vatican is upping the ante with Pan-Amazon Synod
The site below has a lot of useful commentary

Pope Francis’s Green Friends
We can see his true intentions for these summits in the people he invites. The scientists, activists, and politicians who attend are open proponents of population control, contraception, and abortion as “solutions” for global warming. The majority come from the political Left and oppose the Western, free-market economy. Some are enthusiastic supporters of socialism. All accept the man-made global warming theory as dogma.https://panamazonsynodwatch.com/pope-franciss-green-friends/

It is a fait accompli. Under Francis’ power, the Synod on the Amazon will be held in Rome between October 6 and 29.
What orientation will this Synod have? Looking at the team of organizers, its predominant trend will be Liberation Theology. This can give rise to an international orchestration involving the Vatican, the UN, the European Union and NGOs from around the world, which would cry out for an internationalization of the Amazon.
It would be the launching of a new catechesis in which catechizing would be secondary and even superfluous because, according to this catechesis, the Indians already live the beatitudes: they have no private property, profit or competition. Why have a homeland if the real thing would be to establish tribal collectivism?
We would therefore be faced with a communist-inspired “New Church” where property is heresy, the owner a heretic, and life in the wild is the full realization of the human ideal.https://panamazonsynodwatch.com/the-amazon-synod-and-national-sovereignty/

People concerned with the threat of radical environmentalism would be mistaken to assume that the Catholic Church’s upcoming Amazon Synod of Bishops, to be held in Rome in October 2019, is an internal affair dealing with pastoral matters. On the contrary, it will be a laboratory of ecological activism that promises, in the Vatican’s own words, to present a new social, economic, and political “paradigm” for Western civilization to imitate.
Snip
Elevating the Primitive Indian Lifestyle as the Ideal
How can mankind live a more ecological lifestyle? By imitating the Amazonian Indians. We must reject the “myth of progress” and the “dominant culture of consumerism and waste” which “turns the planet into one giant landfill.” Rather, we must re-appropriate the Amazonian Indian “heritage permeated by ancestral wisdom.”
Snip
Quoting Laudato Si, the Preparatory Document itself defines this new ecological “sin.” No longer an offense against God or the breaking of one of the Ten Commandments, it defines “sin” as any act against the Earth. “Already in the biblical stories of creation it emerges that human existence is grounded in ‘three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbor, and with the earth itself…These vital relationships have been broken, both outwardly and within us. This rupture is sin.’” Without mincing words, the Synod fathers affirm that this ecological sin against the earth is “an offense against the Creator, an attack on biodiversity and, in short, on life itself.” [emphasis mine].
Although the document does not name specific acts as sins, its earlier condemnation of oil extraction, mining, and mechanized farming naturally leads one to believe that those activities are an offense against God. True repentance of one’s ecological sins goes far beyond cleaning up air pollution or recycling. “Integral ecology,” they write, “invites us to an integral conversion…Only when we are aware of how our lifestyles – and the ways we produce, trade, consume, and discard – affect the life of our environment and our societies can we initiate a comprehensive change of direction.https://panamazonsynodwatch.com/the-amazon-synod-and-the-vaticans-radical-environmentalism/

The tone of the AGW article is clearly alarmist. It demonstrates selection bias. They do not provide any evidence to demonstrate that the total carbon tied up in the marine biosphere decreases with global warming, nor that it decreases more in the oceans than on land.

The article says:

Many major extinctions have hit marine species harder than terrestrial species, including the greatest loss of life, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction around 252 million years ago, when 95% of marine and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species went extinct.

However, a 2017 paper in Nature finds that the Permian-Triassic mass extinction was caused by an ice age and acidification due to volcanism, not the global warming that followed it: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep43630 .

Models may or may not give a vague idea about a future range of possible temps in 2100. It is much more likely that the usefulness of AOS are limited to probability distributions in a model over a decade at best.

This paper assumes a uniform latitudinal heat gradient rather than the turbulent heat dispersion of real oceans. It neglects by necessity dispersal of organisms both vertically and horizontally. It is a very limited exercise – but to expect black or white, warm or cool answers is to misconstrue science itself. And it is a long bow to compare modern states with conditions at the PTB.

Models may or may not give a vague idea about a future range of possible temps in 2100. It is much more likely that the usefulness of AOS are limited to probability distributions in a model over a decade at best.

It is much more likely that there is no usefulness of AOS. They are limited to only flawed output, over a decade or more or less.

It is the same principle of probabilistic forecasting that hey use for weather and seasonal forecasting. If I link a paper it is relevant and considering it with due diligence and objectivity might go a ways to alleviating ignorance.

“It has been claimed that all models are wrong, but some are useful.”
“That has never been proved to be correct. Over and over, it has been proved to be wrong.”

Weather prediction models are wrong. Weather prediction models are useful. Their predictions have been shown mathematically to have skill vs climatology or persistence. Popes’ generalization has been disproved by counter-example.

Re UHI:
Common sense (and scientists) say, UHI is usually larger, when winds are weak. On windy days, extra heat generated in the UHI is blown away (and partly measured elsewhere).
Why would anyone then use year-averaged data to compute UHI contribution to global warming instead of including only wind-free days?

As I understood, some are not correcting data at all for wind, some try to regress the wind effect, what appears to be similar to produce temperature records with a mix of better/poor proxies and subsequently try to eliminate the poor proxies errors with whatever.
Why not leaving poor data out of the estimate in the first place?

The satellite products all make estimates based on models and assumptions about DIFFERENT things. It is rarely a matter of “choosing” 1 to “believe” in.

The biggest problem is the UAH solution is basically UN CHECKABLE
that’s right

A) they do not archive their raw data
B) They do not provide their Adjustment code.
C) They do no documented testing of their adjustment code
D) They provide no metrics or tests of their adjustment approach.

That said, you have multiple data products produced by multiple teams
estimating different things.

Now of course Spencer gets to voice his opinion on the outcome of the fight he is in

It seems simply untrue in a classic Mosh style. The differences – and they are relatively minor in the scheme of things – appear to involve the use or not of NOAA-14 data. And I promise to read more than the headline.

“We show evidence that MSUs on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s satellites (NOAA-12 and −14, 1990–2001+) contain spurious warming, especially noticeable in three of the four satellite datasets. Comparisons with radiosonde datasets independently adjusted for inhomogeneities and Reanalyses suggest the actual tropical (20°S-20°N) trend is +0.10 ± 0.03°C decade⁻¹. This tropical result is over a factor of two less than the trend projected from the average of the IPCC climate model simulations for this same period (+0.27°C decade⁻¹).”

“Clearly, the RSS, NOAA, and UW satellite datasets are the outliers when it comes to comparisons to radiosondes and reanalyses, having too much warming compared to independent data.

But you might ask, why do those 3 satellite datasets agree so well with each other? Mainly because UW and NOAA have largely followed the RSS lead… using NOAA-14 data even when its calibration was drifting, and using similar strategies for diurnal drift adjustments. Thus, NOAA and UW are, to a first approximation, slightly altered versions of the RSS dataset.”

I have told him why the models are too hot but it is flogging a dead horse.

This is an interesting paper on the Flood history of Europe over the last millennium. Table 1 indicates that only 4 out of 45 major floods listed occurred post 1950.
The paper supplements the 100 years of progress in hydrology link.

“Electric cars and solar panels are the most visible signs of California’s ambitious climate change policies. Now the state is setting its sights on a lower-tech way to cut carbon emissions: soil.

It’s spending millions of dollars to help farmers grow plants, which absorb carbon and help move it into the soil where it can be stored long-term. This makes California home to some of the first official “carbon farmers” in the country.

…

Robles knew that richer earth with more microorganisms holds moisture longer, but there wasn’t a lot of organic matter in his orchard to build the soil up. Like most farmers, he sprayed herbicides to kill weeds.

So he decided to grow organic matter specifically to feed his soil. He planted species that most people commonly see as weeds, but when sown on purpose are known as a “cover crop.”“

This is actually a good idea. Rare for AGW solutions. The more important feature is soil enrichment, and the carbon capture is a mere sop to warmists.

This soil carbon store can be renewed by restoring land. Holding back water in sand dams, terraces and swales, replanting, changing grazing management, encouraging perennial vegetation cover, precise applications of chemicals and adoption of other management practices that create positive carbon and nutrient budgets and optimal soil temperature and moisture. Atmospheric carbon is transferred from the atmosphere to soil carbon stores through plant photosynthesis and subsequent formation of secondary carbonates. The rate of soil carbon sequestration ranges from about 100 to 1000 kg per hectare per year as humus and 5 to 15 kg per hectare per year inorganic carbon. The near term potential for carbon sequestration in agricultural soils is approximately equal to the historic carbon loss of 80 GtC during the modern era. This is about 10 years of global annual greenhouse gas emissions. At realistic rates of sequestration 25% of current annual global greenhouse gas emissions could be sequestered over 40 years.

Carbon sequestration in soils has major benefits in addition to offsetting anthropogenic emissions from fossil fuel combustion, land use conversion, soil cultivation, continuous grazing and cement and steel manufacturing. Restoring soil carbon stores increases agronomic productivity and enhances global food security. Increasing the soil organic content enhances water holding capacity and creates a more drought tolerant agriculture – with less downstream flooding. There is a critical level of soil carbon that is essential to maximising the effectiveness of water and nutrient inputs. Global food security, especially for countries with fragile soils and harsh climate such as in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, cannot be achieved without improving soil quality through an increase in soil organic content. Wildlife flourishes on restored grazing land helping to halt biodiversity loss. Reversing soil carbon loss is a new green revolution where conventional agriculture is hitting a productivity barrier with exhausted soils and increasingly expensive inputs.

Increased agricultural productivity, increased downstream processing and access to markets build local economies and global wealth. Economic growth provides resources for solving problems – conserving and restoring ecosystems, better sanitation and safer water, better health and education, updating the diesel fleet and other productive assets to emit less black carbon and reduce the health and environmental impacts, developing better and cheaper ways of producing electricity, replacing cooking with wood and dung with better ways of preparing food thus avoiding respiratory disease and again reducing black carbon emissions. A global program of agricultural soils restoration is the foundation for balancing the human ecology.

Pope, you may have missed the point that the cover crop is grown between harvests and restores the soil, enhancing the growth of the crop that feeds people. Farmers have been doing this with alfalfa for decades.

“The results presented here along with ref.24 indicate that multiple aspects of natural tropical Pacific variability play important roles in modulating surface melting of the Ross Ice Shelf and potentially influxes of CDW onto the continental shelf due to local zonal wind forcing. In the coming decades, as the IPO likely shifts to its positive phase73, an increase in anti-cyclonic circulation over the Ross Sea is expected during spring, which would reduce the surface warming but increase local westerly wind anomalies over the continental shelf. Such changes in surface melt and ocean-driven basal melt therefore oppose each other in this region, and the relative importance of these competing mechanisms for future Ross Ice Shelf stability will require further cross-disciplinary study involving glaciologists and oceanographers to fully understand the influence of the IPO on the stability of the Ross Ice Shelf (which is outside the scope of this investigation).”

When the ice donuts of ice shelves and sea ice around Antarctic are large, snowfall is not enough to maintain the volume and weight and flow rate of the ice. The ice depletes and does less cooling by dumping ice into the oceans, The oceans warm and the ice donuts disappear, sea ice thaws and ice shelves break off and float away. Then the evaporation and snowfall on land increases and the ice is replenished until volume and weight increase flow rates and cause colder. This natural ice cycle is self correcting and worked for millions of years and will continue to work as designed, for millions of years to come. There will be continued colder and warmer cycles, This cycle can never stop. It always snows to much until it gets colder and then it always snows too little until it gets warmer. The same thing occurs in the Arctic Polar Region and the two hemispheres’ cycles are not synchronized with each other or with the sun. Major ice ages were together for the large cycle, but not little cycles inside the large cycle. This is because the oceans were deep and warm at the same time to build the major ice and the oceans were low and cold at the same time to deplete the ice. The ice that caused and ended major ice ages was on NH continents.

The amount of water and ice that is involved with each cycle determines how long snowfall lasts to build the ice on land and the amount of ice and water that is involved with each cycle determines how long it takes to thaw the ice and return it to the oceans.
Over millions of years, land movement and rerouting of warm ocean currents into polar regions, increased evaporation and snowfall there and supported larger and colder cycles until the Antarctic sequestered enough ice to stop the major cycles.

Tropical regions do not freeze and they gather and send the energy toward the poles to power these cycles. Most heating and cooling of earth is done in the tropics and mid latitudes. The cooling by ice in polar regions increased as circulation increased. We have enjoyed a new normal of smaller cycles for ten thousand years. This will continue.

The alarmists pick something that has always changed, claimed it has been a hockey stick handle for thousands of years and must remain so, or we must give them our money and power so they can try to prevent what happens naturally.

The fight anyone who wants to understand natural causes. The say it is chaotic and only stopping using fossil fuels will cause it to stop being chaotic. They get rich from windmills and solar panels while the (western) world pays more for less reliable energy.

Ethanol for replacing Fossil Fuels does not work, that is as evil as windmills and solar panels. They use fossil fuel in their machinery to plant, harvest and transport the crops and fossil fuel use is not diminished due to ethanol production. Ethanol use does damage to our engines.

To the modelling question:
There is an interesting observation from AI research in a recent speech by Léon Bottou (accidently the .djvu inventor) concerning discriminationg between correlation and causation . See https://go.technologyreview.com/can-machine-learning-help-us-understand-why?ecid=&utm_campaign=the_algorithm.unpaid.engagement&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9CGN5w655gCRaZoGy6iz-u-LIPAYydHkTLmDKUCDKA2SOWhJfm-hq_xZHDP2bjEYhHJ9_o
“Different data that comes from different contexts—whether collected at different times, in different locations, or under different experimental conditions—should be preserved as separate datasets rather than mixed and combined. When they are consolidated, as they are now, important contextual information gets lost, leading to a much higher likelihood of spurious correlations.”
There are many way to create an average temperature for the globe.
Thermodynamic variable distributions that give the same average may systematically be associated with different dissipation efficiency. Such biases may be compensated for a “learning” period by some tuning but later may lead to different ECS.
How might this be resolved? By the above models should actually replicate regional weather patterns over time which is impossible because of chaos?

The Hidden Subsidy of Fossil Fuels
Financial numbers are supposed to be used. The made up IMF post-tax subsidy number is a political number. Not a number someone making a financial decision would use. And the people who put it together are hacks, not accountants. Here’s a number people use: The cost of goods sold is up 10% from a year ago. And up 12% from its 5 year average. Now do something. People die in auto accidents. That’s what the post-tax subsidy number includes. Now do something. Must be fossil fuels. Their number has no use and doesn’t solve anything or fix anything.

This suggests that a decline in ice age atmospheric CO2 levels around one million years ago might have caused the stronger and longer ice ages. But this also creates a new mystery: Why did ice age CO2 drop during the MPT?

An even deeper mystery – why is it so hard to imagine that the stronger and longer ice ages around one million years ago might have caused a decline in ice age atmospheric CO2 levels?

Climate normals are traditionally calculated every decade as the average values over a period of time, often 30 years. Such an approach assumes a stationary climate, with several alternatives recently introduced to account for monotonic climate change. However, these methods fail to account for interannual climate variability (e.g., the El Niño-Southern Oscillation; ENSO) which systematically alters the background state of the climate similar to climate change. These effects and their uncertainties are well established, but they are not reflected in any readily available climate normals datasets.

A new high-resolution set of normals is derived for the contiguous United States that accounts for ENSO and uses the optimal climate normal (OCN) – a 10-year (15-year) running average for temperature (precipitation) – to account for climate change. Anomalies are calculated by subtracting the running means and then compositing into 5 ENSO phase and intensity categories: Strong La Niña, Weak La Niña, Neutral, Weak El Niño, and Strong El Niño. Seasonal composites are produced for each of the five phases. The ENSO Normals are the sum of these composites with the OCN for a given month. The result is five sets of normals, one for each phase, which users may consult with respect to anticipated ENSO outcomes. While well-established ENSO patterns are found in most cases, a distinct East-West temperature anomaly pattern emerges for Weak El Niño events.

Linking “normal” climate to ENSO to account for or predict variability might seem like an advance on assuming climate uniformity. However right now, USA climate is quite extreme (cold) while ENSO is close to neutral.

Their hypothesis is clearly incorrect and part of the need to explain climate changes of the past in terms of CO2. The Mid-Pleistocene transition was caused by the progressive cooling of the Earth as it progressed into the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, when it reached a point when the amount of extra-polar ice build-up was so large that it could no longer be melted solely by obliquity, requiring the concurrence of several factors that only assemble on average every 80-120 kyr coinciding with 2-3 obliquity oscillations.

Yet another example of science-on-demand producing useless garbage. This article only adds confusion to the field.

The Mid-Pleistocene transition was caused by the progressive cooling of the Earth as it progressed into the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, when it reached a point when the amount of extra-polar ice build-up was so large that it could no longer be melted solely by obliquity, requiring the concurrence of several factors that only assemble on average every 80-120 kyr coinciding with 2-3 obliquity oscillations.

Total not understanding climate. The ice is always being replenished in warm times and the ice is always thawing in warm and cold times. in warm times it snows more and ice increases until the ice makes it colder. in cold times it snows less and ice depletes until less ice allows it to get warmer.

Not only can we work to minimize our footprint but we can also create positive handprints. It is time to strive for a world that thrives.”

The world has always thrived. Some groups of people thrived with the world and some failed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Climate Alarmists are saying, give us money and control or the world will cease to thrive. We have proved that is some countries already, give us control and you will cease to thrive. Alarmists can kill any healthy economy, they have proved that many times.

The global economy is worth about $100 trillion a year. To put aid and philanthropy into perspective – the total is 0.025% of the global economy. If spent on Copenhagen Consensus smart development goals such expenditure can generate a benefit to cost ratio of more than 15. If spent on the UN Sustainable Development Goals you may as well piss it up against a wall. Either way – it is nowhere near the major path to universal prosperity. Some 3.5 billion people make less than $2 a day. Changing that can only be done by doubling and tripling global production – and doing it as quickly as possible. Optimal economic growth is essential and that requires an understanding and implementation of explicit principles for effective governance of free markets.

Only rich economies can afford environments – and ranting about alarmists won’t get us there.

“In experimental philosophy we are to look upon p-propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, not withstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.” Newton’s fourth rule of natural philosophy

This study uses data on deep ocean carbon storage to infer changes in MOC at a critical time. Notwithstanding other hypotheses that can be imagined – and that is all they are – in the murky past. No one is suggesting that this is a unified climate theory – but it is a cog in a complex whole.

When talking about 1.5 C of warming being dangerous and leading to extinctions, its always worth remembering the Dansgaard–Oeschger warming events where Greenland temperatures increased by 10-15 degrees over a couple of centuries only. This happened about 20 times during the last glacial period alone. A suprising number of animal and plant species (i.e. nearly all of those alive today) avoided extinction during these multiple temperature excursions 10 times larger than 1.5 C. (Modern humans evolved during this period – that’s how harmful climate change is to humanity.)

Unsurprisingly the mechanism driving these DA excursions is shown (confirmed) in this paper to be the AMOC whose acceleration leads to warming. The AMOC starts accelerating about a century before the DA warming reaches its maximum rate and the Arctic glaciation (temporarily) collapses.

Other much less severe oscillations in NH climate, such as the AMO, are also driven by fluctuation in the strength of the AMOC. Thus the current decreasing of the AMOC strength presages a period of mild cooling.

The positive feedback of the Gulf Stream salinity transport to the Arctic, the cold water downwelling and formation in the Norwegian sea and Greenland ice melt, are the instability at the heart of the system making it an excitable medium and driving intermittent nonlinear oscillation.

However what is remarkable about this nonlinear oscillation of AMOC is the wide range of amplitudes that it is able to display. The massive – almost unimaginable by today’s standards – climate changes of the DA warming events and the ten times smaller oscillations associated with the AMO, are both driven by the same mechanism of chaos-driven AMOC oscillation. Except that the AMOC oscillation is showing very different amplitudes. This is another layer of the complexity and chaotic dynamics of the AMOC. Being a nonlinear – chaos related phenomenon I am sure that a plot of AMOC fluctuation amplitude with frequency would show the typical log-log relationship indicating fractality.

When talking about 1.5 C of warming being dangerous and leading to extinctions, its always worth remembering the Dansgaard–Oeschger warming events where Greenland temperatures increased by 10-15 degrees over a couple of centuries only.

Coxon and McCarron (2009) has a chart showing similar temperature increases over 7 and 9 years (14,500 and 11,500 years ago). See Figure 15:21 here: http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/1983/ . The caption says:

“Figure 15.21 The stable isotope record (∂18O) from the GRIP ice core (histogram) compared to the record of N.pachyderma a planktonic foraminiferan whose presence indicates cold sea temperatures) from ocean sediments (dotted line). High concentrations of IRD from the Troll 8903 core are marked with arrows. After Haflidason et al. (1995). The transition times for critical lengths of the core were calculated from the sediment accumulation rates by the authors and these gave the following results: Transition A: 9 years; Transition B: 25 years; and Transition C: 7 years. Such rapid transitions have been corroborated from the recent NGRIP ice core data.” During these rapid rates of warming, life thrived. This is important because it suggests that rapid warming is net beneficial, not a threat, to ecosystems, at least in the mid and high latitudes.

“Gerard C. Bond reconstructed a Holocene series of North Atlantic ice-rafting events (Bond et al., 1997, 2001) based on the numbers of counted quartz and haematite-stained grains in marine cores recovered from the subpolar North Atlantic (Fig. 1a). These so-called “Bond events” document nine (Fig. 3b) large-scale and multi-centennial North Atlantic cooling phases that might be linked to a reduced thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic. Due to attested large-scale atmosphere–ocean-linked teleconnections, an increasing number of palaeoclimatologists relate Bond events with chronologically in-phase climatic anomalies all over the world.” https://www.clim-past.net/15/463/2019/cp-15-463-2019.pdf

In C/N and Sed rate there is the 8k2 event, and the 4k2 (this event actually starts earlier at the start of the marked upshot, 2345bce from dendrochronology). C/N shows also blips at ~5k5 (3550bce) and ~6k2 (4375bce). In these instances it is the geology that tells a clear picture.

See how those dates show up in many studies, at times with somewhat wide margins. The abruptness of the events is not evident in climate related data, but in the geological. They correlate to historical population irruptions. Of course some latitudes find the change as ameliorating, but mammals don’t shift to new area without heavy toll in numbers. It is why we should be ready.

When talking about 1.5 C of warming being dangerous and leading to extinctions

The following suggest that warming may be net beneficial for ecosystems, not harmful.

1. I infer that the optimum GMST for ecosystems is that which existed around the Eocene Thermal Maximum [1] and during the ‘Cambrian Explosion’, i.e. ~25–28˚C (i.e. 10–13˚C warmer than present).

2. Most major extinction events [2] have been due to bolide impacts, volcanism and ice ages, not due to global warming

3. The PETM was due to warming but it was less severe than most mass extinctions

The most dramatic example of sustained warming is the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum [3], which was associated with one of the smaller mass extinctions.

4. The cause of the Permian-Triassic Boundary mass extinction event has recently been reported as an ice age, not global warming (Baresel et al., 2017) [4]

4. I do not know of any major extinction events that were due to global warming when GMST was below the optimum (which was ~7–13˚C above present GMST)

6. Even very rapid warming is beneficial for ecosystems. Coxon and McCarron (2009) [5] Figure 15:21 shows temperatures in Ireland, Greenland and Iceland warmed from near LGM temperatures to near current temperatures in 7 years 14,500 years BP and in 9 years 11,500 BP. Life thrived during these events.

7. Biosphere productivity is increasing during the current warming – the planet has greened by about 14% during 35 years of satellite observations (Donohue et al., 2013) [6], Zhu et al. (2016) [7], Greening of the Earth and its drivers)

10. The mass of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere has increased substantially during the warming from the LGM. Jeltsch-Thömmes et al. 2019 [10], find that the mass of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere increased by about 40% (850 GtC) from LGM to preindustrial times. This compares with 10%-50% (300-1000 GtC) increase from LGM to the pre-industrial inventory of about 3,000 GtC stated in IPCC AR4 WG1 Chapter 6 [11]. This also indicates that warming is beneficial for ecosystems.

I infer from the above that global warming is probably net beneficial for ecosystems when GMST is below the optimum (which may be around 7–13˚C above present GMST).

For me the most important finding of Baresel et al 2017 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep43630 is that the cause of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event – during which 95% of marine species became extinct – was an ice age, not global warming as had previously been accepted.

Regarding your question:

is this paper saying that chemical processes associated with glacial marine regression have been misinterpreted as bottom water anoxia, at the end-Permian extinction?

This is outside my area of expertise. However, the short answer to your question is “Yes”. I interpret the paper as saying:

The extinction was caused by a combination of 1) abrupt cooling causing falling sea levels and marine regression and shrinking habitat on shelves, and 2) intense acidification of the oceans due to release of sulphur rich volatiles during the Siberian Traps volcanism. Terrestrial plants also were impacted by the drier and cooler climate during the abrupt ice age.

I include some quotes below for the benefit of other readers:

“The mainstream claim that the mass extinction occurred “during the transgressive pulse when anoxic bottom waters often became extensive”4 is untenable in the view of our timing from the South Chinese record with its locally restricted occurrences of Griesbachian anoxic marine deposits15,20,34,35,36. The duration of 89 ± 38 kyr for the hiatus in the Luolou Platform can only be explained by a short term marine regression of glacio-eustatic origin possibly combined with submarine dissolution of carbonate through acidification of surface waters. …”

Regarding the cause, I quote:

“All these observations from the Nanpanjiang Basin as well as from other relevant sections world-wide must be integrated into a coherent causes and effects model. In this endeavor, the volcanogenic sulfur aerosol-driven model proposed by refs 37 and 38 provides the most parsimonious working frame, with the greatest explanatory power. Stratospheric injection of volcanogenic sulfur volatiles and subsequent condensation into aerosols are seen as the proximal cause for brief climate cooling39,40 and ensuing global regression41, provided that the cooling was profound enough to store water as terrestrial ice. Sulfur volatiles also provide a direct mechanism for ocean acidification. Abrupt cooling likely resulted from the atmospheric injection of both volcanogenic and remobilized SO2 and H2S from early Paleozoic evaporites by the initial emplacement of dykes and sills of the Siberian Traps42,43. This scenario simultaneously accounts for acidification of ocean surface waters and for the global regression. The synergistic effects of shrunken marine habitats on continental shelves through a global eustatic regression, of fast temperature drop down, and of substantial acidification are all compatible with the new timing proposed here. Moreover, paleontological evidence (e.g., ref. 44), facies interpretations and sediment accumulation rates are all compatible with the volcanogenic sulfur aerosol-driven model for the PTBME.” [Permian Triassic Boundary Mass Extinction Event]

…

“The “lethally” hot temperatures that were subsequently proposed as second kill mechanism5,6 are also irreconcilable with our model that involves a glacio-eustatic low-stand at the PTB.”

…

“Abrupt drop down of sea surface temperature, shrunken habitats on shelves resulting from a global low stand, and short-term acidification may all have synergistically triggered the PTBME.”

Peter
Bill Illis has also posted published evidence that the end-Permian extinction was indeed a cold, not hot event. This of course directly contradicts warmist-alarmist doctrine.

It’s not unreasonable to consider the dinosaur era (Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous) as the high point of life on earth. In terms of the productivity and fecundity of animal and plant life and the sophistication of the large animals i.e. dinosaurs. For example they had the same breathing system as birds, where airflow over the alveoli is unidirectional. (It is a complex system employing air sacs throughout the body.) This is literally 10 times more efficient than our comparatively crude tidal lung that dates from the Silurian-Carboniferous. That’s why birds can fly between continents while bats only flutter round their home tree. Thus the dinosaurs ran rings around sluggish mammalian ancestors. Plants also extended to the poles.

By comparison the current Quaternary is much cooler than the optimum for multicellular life, and is seriously CO2 starved, dangerously close to the 150 ppm CO2 level which is where a CO2 starvation extinction event begins. Life on earth now is a shadow of its former self. Dinosaurs BTW were on their way to evolving sentience like humans. Among lines such as the Struthiomimids, vision was binocular, forebrains were expanding and opposing thumbs were developing. They would have become reptilian hominid-like creatures like us – except better at playing the organ since the tail would balance them as they leaned forward to press the pedals. (Current church organists have a balance problem since they lack a tail.) The Chixilub meteor has a lot to answer for!

The more one dwells on the true facts, the more dangerously wrong the whole warmist-catastrophist story is seen to be.

Thank you for that excellent comment. I didn’t know most of that. The bird and bat comparison really highlights the important differences between dinosaurs and mammals that you mentioned.

This is really good information. I hope you will keep posting similar comments. Perhaps a post.

From my perspective it is the impacts of global warming, not the amount of temperatures change, that is relevant for justifying policy. Therefore, the discussion should be focused on the impacts, not climate change projections. However, I am pretty much on my own on this here. Any help to move the debate to what is most important and relevant for policy would be great.

Thanks you for the link to Pierre Gosselin’s NoTricksZone page “… species extinctions decline with warming; mass extinction events due to cooling”. It has many good quotes from published literature. Many thanks.

Peter
Bill Illis has several times commented at WUWT on the end Permian cold events (bounded before and after by warm events) – I was just remembering, I’d have to search for links. He posted some graphs to this effect. You linked post by him is a good one, I had not seen it before, thanks!

Dansgaard–Oeschger warming events where Greenland temperatures increased by 10-15 degrees over a couple of centuries only.

NGRIP δ¹⁸O records indicate that the warming took place within 70 years at most.“D-O oscillations are characterized by their asymmetric change in temperatures. They all display a very fast warming, with temperatures rising by about 7-13 °C (9 °C average, Central Greenland temperature) in less than seven decades, within the span of a human life (Fig. 3.4). The warming rate is an amazing 1 °C every seven years. This abrupt warming ceases synchronously for nearly all D-O events (Fig. 3.4). Given that the rate and duration of the warming phase is very similar, despite very dissimilar previous conditions, it suggests that the source of heat probably has a constrained enthalpy capacity, and the amount of heat released is similar for all D-O events.”

Unsurprisingly the mechanism driving these DO excursions is shown (confirmed) in this paper to be the AMOC whose acceleration leads to warming.

No. It is impossible that you can get that amount of heat advected by an oceanic current and released at a specific location in such an abrupt manner without a specific mechanism. The heat has to be stored and abruptly released and the similarity in the abruptness and amount of heat released under quite different conditions indicates there is a geometric constraint. This has already been studied by multiple authors (Dokken et al., 2013, for example). The heat is stored in the Nordic Seas/North Atlantic subsurface under sea ice and a strongly stratified multi-layer maintained by meltwater addition. The sudden break of the stratification at a certain time abruptly releases the stored subsurface heat producing the DO warming. The basin geometry is what constrains the amount of heat released at each DO.

JavierNo. It is impossible that you can get that amount of heat advected by an oceanic current and released at a specific location in such an abrupt manner without a specific mechanism.

That is indeed what is curious – that NH climate fluctuations with a very wide range of amplitude, from DA to the AMO, are linked to the same AMOC mechanism. It could just have a range of different rates or power settings. Or alternatively, as you suggest, it could during glacial periods trigger another mechanism such as warm water release from under ice.

That’s always seemed a paradox – yes I’ve read elsewhere that during glacial times deep water warmer than at present is trapped near the sea floor under ice sheets. This seems a recipe for instability but conversely we see longer glacial periods than interglacial. The glacial periods do seem less stable than interglacials – the DA events are a sign of this – but they last a lot longer. That is a paradox.

If during glacials, deep water in under ice and maybe elsewhere is warmer, this points to an apparent adiabatic-like nature of climate – since ocean heat capacity is so vast, it’s a zero sum game, if one part is colder another must be warmer. This fact will allow the climate establishment to save face when the next glaciation arrives and Boston, Newcastle, Hamburg etc have to be evacuated due to glacier encroachment. They can just point to warmer ocean bottom water and claim that global warming is surging ahead with nary a pause!

It is complex and multi-faceted both physically and biological. Warming per se may have little to do with greening.

“The present interglacial, the Holocene, spans the period of the last 11,700 years. It has sustained the growth and development of modern society. The millennial-scale decreasing solar insolation in the Northern Hemisphere summer lead to Northern Hemisphere cooling, a southern shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and a weakening of the Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon systems. On the multidecadal to multicentury-scale, periods of more stable and warmer climate were interrupted by several cold relapses, at least in the Northern Hemisphere extra-tropical area. Based on carefully selected 10,000-year-long time series of temperature and humidity/precipitation, as well as reconstructions of glacier advances, the spatiotemporal pattern of six cold relapses during the last 10,000 years was analysed and presented in form of a Holocene Climate Atlas (HOCLAT; see http://www.oeschger.unibe.ch/
research/projects/holocene_atlas/). A clear cyclicity was not found, and the spatiotemporal variability of temperature and humidity/precipitation during the six specific cold events (8200, 6300, 4700, 2700,
1550 and 550 years BP) was very high. Different dynamical processes such as meltwater flux into the
North Atlantic, low solar activity, explosive volcanic eruptions, and fluctuations of the thermohaline
circulation likely played a major role. In addition, internal dynamics in the North Atlantic and Pacific area
(including their complex interaction) were likely involved.”

But with Bond Event 0, enhanced NH blocking, a declining AMOC and more upwelling in the eastern Pacific over centuries – predictions of warming using chaotic models – that miss internal variability – seem problematic.

“Each abrupt warming shares a qualitatively similar temperature evolution: about 1000 years of relatively stable cold conditions, terminated by an abrupt (less than 10 years) jump to much warmer conditions that persist for 200–400 years, followed by a more gradual transition (~50 to 200 years) back to the cold conditions that precede the warming event. This sequence of climate changes is often referred to as a D‐O cycle.” https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/palo.20042

Cooling seems a bit abrupt as well. There are two theories. In models ad hoc freshwater influx and the impact on AMOC can reproduce observed D-O events – albeit with perhaps unrealistic freshwater inflow. See reference above. The other idea involves relatively warm water flowing north , spilling over the Greenland-Iceland-Faroe ridge and accumulating in the basin of the Nordic Seas.

This sets up ocean/ice sheet dynamics that result in ice sheet breakup, rafting and the releases of heat to the atmosphere.

“Surface air temperature response during the extended winter season (December–April) to changes in Nordic seas ice cover (figure redrawn from simulations in Li et al. [2010]). Black contours indicate maximum (March) ice extent in the two scenarios. The white dot is the location of our core MD992284.”

Either way it involves AMOC as a powerful agent of change in the Earth system.

Thanks Robert
I agree that the abrupt events are linked to internal nonlinear-dynamic processes so can’t all be attributed to external (e.g. solar) forcing – we differ from our friend Javier on this. Nonlinear forcing that is intermittent or weak might take place which would be hard to trace due to its complex emergent time pattern. (Thus the elusive appearance of correlation which comes and goes.) The AMOC does seem central to climate at least in the NH. I guess the absence of the equivalent of the AMOC in the SH is part of the reason between the asynchrony between the hemispheres.

Quote from paper ” A range of different mechanisms has been proposed that can produce similar warming in model experiments; however, the progression and ultimate trigger of the events are still unknown. ”

Are DO events another name for Eddy cycle? It has been shown by others that the last four glacial cycles behaved in same manner, yet with enough minor differences to indicate a chaotic element in the triggering. However a common element was the abruptness of the triggering.

Thank you. What is needed to inform climate policy (and whether rapid warming is dangerous) is how ecosystems responded to the rapid warming and rapid cooling events. What research has been done to investigate this?

In principle a catastrophe – and I use the word advisably – involves incremental changes that at a point drive the system past a threshold – after which a new state spontaneously emerges in a complex interaction of subsystems.. It is the dominant scientific paradigm of the Earth system that paradoxically requires ditching simple cause and effect.

Bond events are the Holocene counterpart of D-O events. There is a beguiling symmetry between these and solar activity. That may derive from solar modulation of the northern annular mode.

No they are not. Bond events are cooling events with mixed periodicity and different causes, while DO events are warming events with a single cause. Bond and DO events have different cause, different periodicities and different effect. They simply cannot be any more different.

“someone or something that has the same job or purpose as another person or thing, but in a different country, time, situation, or organization”

And the purpose is millennial scale aperiodic variability – both warming and cooling – emerging from global system dynamics that are seen through a glass darkly.

“Climate processes: the recognition of the 4.2 ka event in proxy records from North America, through the Middle East to China, and from Africa, parts of South America to Antarctica12 suggests that past environmental changes in the Mediterranean may reflect the influence of climate dynamics at the global scale.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-27056-2

“Climate is ultimately complex. Complexity begs for reductionism. With reductionism, a puzzle is studied by way of its pieces. While this approach illuminates the climate system’s components, climate’s full picture remains elusive. Understanding the pieces does not ensure understanding the collection of pieces.” Marcia Wyatt

So the mooted cause – inter alia – of DO events is warm water in the basin of the Nordic Seas and the dynamics of winter ice. But is this the complete picture? There are whole other dimensions in the global stadium wave that reveal that things are by no means this simple.

This paper compliments the others as appear in the links: https://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/papers2/Balascio_ClimateofPast_2015.pdf
The basis are the findings as put in the various Bond papers. There are others, including Med sediments. All are proxies that appear to correlate chronologically. However they are the various effects to a dominating cause, as yet unknown.
I am an ‘outlier’ in this field. The main interest was/is the dating of abrupt events, in my case to link to abrupt changes that appear in archaeological ancient engineering. They tell more (relink: https://melitamegalithic.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/searching-evidence-update-2/ ) See top part, unbelievable as it may be to the majority. It is the source of the enigma. An anomaly with ‘inherited info’, it points to weird dynamics.
I referred to obliquity in fig9 from WUWT link, it is more of a superimposed weak signature, weaker than eccentricity. Digging the sources, obliquity is the calculated “secular” change, extrapolated back in time, and based around an empirical constant, the latter assumed unchanging, which does not seem to be the case, as the proxies also seem to tell.
The last two millennia we know – or we can know- from historical info; warming and cooling. The Holocene Max was more than that, somewhat different.

The criterion for the solar minimum is not whether the spots have an SC24 or SC25 polarity. That is irrelevant. The criterion is that the smoothed SSN (as calculated by SILSO) reaches a minimum. 10.6 cm adjusted flux reached a minimum in November and sunspots have been growing in number since February. My own study indicated early 2019 as the time for the solar minimum.https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/07/the-approaching-solar-cycle-24-minimum/

As long as the evidence doesn’t show me wrong I will continue to believe in what the data shows. February was the month with the least SS so far, and that was four months ago. A few more months should confirm a minimum in early 2019.

The smoothed SSN is NOT the criterion. It’s the polarity of the spots. However, since you don’t accept this convention you show that you face your own reality. Good to know.

I’ll take SILSO’s criterion over yours anytime:“This smoothing formula was introduced in the early 20th century by the Zürich observatory, then in charge of the sunspot number production.
…
Indeed, the smoothed series is meant for two main purposes:
– generating a series that reflects only the overal evolution of each solar cycle, by filtering out the fast variations (random surges and 27-day rotational modulation)
– defining the times of maximum and minimum for each cycle, thus providing the consistent timebase on which other series can be linked to the solar semi-regular periodicity.”http://www.sidc.be/silso/node/52

It seems you have no clue how the solar minimum is defined by the curators of the International Sunspot Number.

Nice try! How would be able to look into the future when smoothing sunspot numbers in realtime? Do you know anything about the butterfly diagramm shown above? The sunspots of the new cycle don’t appear in the near of sun’s aequator where the actual spot is observed. And: the polarity switch ( the crossover of the count of magnetic polarized spots of the “new” vs. the “old” cycle) is the criterion for the proclamation of the new cycle. However, if you see the SC25 in the physics it’s okay. You’re the only one I’m afraid.

the polarity switch … is the criterion for the proclamation of the new cycle.

Show me by whom. Who proclaims the new cycle according to sunspot polarity?. I have already showed you the criterion by SILSO (Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations) who are the curators of the International Sunspot Number, and they use the monthly smoothed sunspot number criterion.http://www.sidc.be/silso/node/52

This criterion allows to define the solar minimum for every cycle since 1750 long before the polarity of sunspots was registered. There is not even a public dataset for sunspot polarity.

The butterfly diagram is not used to define the minimum because it requires a sunspot quantification, not a graphical display.

Javier, behind the scene there is some physics, not a smoothing of anything. And the physics have some terms to count a sunspot for the old/new cycle. You can find the minimum AFTER the event when smoothing the SSN, not if it’s still to come. The SC24 is not over because the majority of spots have the magnetic polarity of it. IF the spots to come have the changed polarity in it’s majority the SC26 will be declared. This is not the case up to now, look here http://www.solen.info/solar/cycle25_spots.html to follow the record of spots counting for SC25. Glad to help you out!

Really a great paper. The argument show exactly why advanced science occurred only in the west, under the Christian patrimony. Christianity introduced the notion of the Logos, i.e. an ordered universe, based on the ordered mind of God.
The civilizations that worshipped seven different types of monkeys, the moon, could never develop science.
In addition, the modern constituency that has abandoned Christianity faces the same dilemna. Absent an assumption of Logos, the mind, and all reason is nothing more than prejudice, white supremacy, or, if one is more honest, the random conclusions of molecular and hormonal balances.
Hence 60 different genders.

This maybe a simplistic view, but why would I not want to reduce my CO2 emissions, energy is expensive, the less I use, the more I save. A modest investment in technology has has reduced my monthly electricity bill to £20 (including fixed charges and some tax), smart controls are reducing our heating costs. There is the potential for a virtuous circle.

It is ALL about use of limited financial resources efficiently and intelligently….or not.

There are areas where it makes sense for humans to spend resources to research ways to reduce CO2 emissions. Most won’t impact the long term CO2 growth curve. If we hit 500 ppm by 2100 the weather will be better in some places and worse in others.

I am always a bit suspicious of simple prognostications. A mechanical analogy may explain why.

Many simple systems exhibit abrupt change. The balance above consists of a curved track on a fulcrum. The arms are curved so that there are two stable states where a ball may rest. ‘A ball is placed on the track and is free to roll until it reaches its point of rest. This system has three equilibria denoted (a), (b) and (c) in the top row of the figure. The middle equilibrium (b) is unstable: if the ball is displaced ever so slightly to one side or another, the displacement will accelerate until the system is in a state far from its original position. In contrast, if the ball in state (a) or (c) is displaced, the balance will merely rock a bit back and forth, and the ball will roll slightly within its cup until friction restores it to its original equilibrium.

In (a1) the arms are displaced but not sufficiently to cause the ball to cross the balance to the other side. In (a2) the balance is displaced with sufficient force to cause the ball to move to a new equilibrium state on the other arm. There is a third possibility in that the balance is hit with enough force to cause the ball to leave the track, roll off the table and under the sofa.

“Anxiety about global warming has become such a concern that the American Psychological Association created a 69-page climate-change guide to help mental health care providers…”

Looking for southern California coastal cooling this summer this due to unusually cooler ocean temperatures, I’m wondering if this will require the APA to update its climate-change guide and add a few pages to help relieve the Leftists’ coming anxieties concerning a coming ice age?

What can psychologists do to help those suffering from ‘Hot World Syndrome’ when their concerns change to ‘climate change’ in general, neither of which involve factors that we can do anything about but know that as in the past, humanity can only use common sense, apply the scientific method to expose the hoax and scare tactics of the Left and adapt to whatever nature brings our way?

“The return of a March-like weather pattern, driven by a large dip in the jet stream, will be the culprit for driving this rare storm into the West Coast.
Abnormally chilly air will accompany the clouds and rain later this week, with high temperatures struggling to reach the lower to middle 60s F across the Central Valley on Thursday. Normal highs during the middle of May are in the 80s”.

perplexing how those lack the basic analytical skills to recognize how bogus the claims of “fossil Fuel subsidies” somehow possess the superior intellectual capacity to ascertain the validity of climate science.

FWIw – these studies claiming governments provide oil companies with massive subsidies are so riddled with errors, they are complete jokes.

Warm oceans promote evaporation and that rebuilds the snow and ice sequestered in the mountains.
Warm times are normal, natural, necessary and unstoppable. It always gets colder after it is warmer and it always gets warmer after it is colder.

The reality is that climate is complex and dynamic. There is uncertainty because the modern science of complex and dynamic systems has little confidence in the 12th century philosopher William of Ockham. Global warming of 2°C well and truly crosses the line of the all too simplistic. It’s much worse than that but does it really matter?

“Forecast rainfall anomalies (mm/day; shading) from 24 – 28 May 2019. The forecasts are from the 00Z 13 May 2019 GFS ensemble.”

Have a look at the video at the end of the page. Although it is not so simple of course – and my thoughts on the northern annular mode is that it is a vortex extending from the surface to the stratosphere.

In a near real time supercomputer visualization at 250 hPa.
And at 700 hPa.

“… the risk of that happening amplifies when the planet is being forced to change most rapidly.”

Such as, being struck by a comet, the sun goes quiet,volcanoes erupt, Earth’s axis shifts or when socialist-totalitarian nihilists consign half the globe to starvation due to energy deprivation and commit genocide, all in the name of their new god of ‘global heating’ narcissism and anti-modernism.

Abstract
The early 20th century warming (EW; 1910-1945) and the mid-20th century cooling (MC; 1950-1980) have been linked to both, internal variability of the climate system and changes in external radiative forcing. The degree to which either of the two factors contributed to EW and MC, or both, is still debated. Using a two-box impulse response model, we demonstrate that multidecadal ocean variability was unlikely to be the driver of observed changes in global mean surface temperature (GMST) after 1850 A.D. Instead, virtually all (97-98%) of the global low-frequency variability (> 30 years) can be explained by external forcing. We find similarly high percentages of explained variance for inter-hemispheric and land-ocean temperature evolution. Three key aspects are identified which underpin the conclusion of this new study: inhomogeneous anthropogenic aerosol forcing (AER), biases in the instrumental sea surface temperature (SST) datasets, and inadequate representation of the response to varying forcing factors. Once the spatially heterogeneous nature of AER is accounted for, the MC period is reconcilable with external drivers. SST biases and imprecise forcing responses explain the putative disagreement between models and observations during the EW period. As a consequence, Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV) is found to be primarily controlled by external forcing too. Future attribution studies should account for these important factors when discriminating between externally-forced and internallygenerated influences on climate. We argue that AMV must not be used as a regressor and suggest a revised AMV index instead (North Atlantic Variability Index; NAVI). Our associated best estimate for the transient climate response (TCR) is 1.57 K (±0.70 at the 5-95% confidence level).

Gee, how many times have I trashed the AMO as the feckless ocean cycle?

Terrible paper. One of the mathematical features of the model they are using (or any similar LTI model) is that you cannot obtain a frequency in the response function that is not contained in the input (forcing). So they have gone on a snark-hunt to find nit-picking variations in radiative forcing inputs which would “explain” the unexplained multidecadal variation in the temperature series. Tweaking the inputs, and where they can’t get enough tweak, they question the data. The problem is that the variations which they are inventing to explain the 20th century fluctuations cannot possibly explain the long-term historical variation. Jevrejeva shows the quasi 60-year oscillation in sea-level measurements back to 1700. Chambers (http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/there-60-year-oscillation-global-mean-sea-level) confirmed its presence on an ocean basin scale. Knudsen (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1186) tracked the AMO back through 8000 years using high resolution multi-proxy data.
Haustein et al are IMO correct in concluding that AMV is forced. (We can deduce this directly from the relative phasing of temperature and net flux. ) But they are looking in the wrong direction to explain it.

Some key sentences from this paper:
“Rather than using the standard definition (Delworth and Mann 2000) or an improved definition thereof (van Oldenborgh et al. 2009), we define the AMV as average SST at 25-60N and 7-75W (red box in Fig. 8d) minus NHem temperature.”
This leads to a strong weakening of the “AMV” after about 1980 calculated in this way due to stronger land warming than ocean warming. I don’t have any clue about the used physics :-)
One more find into the direction of LC/18:
“…yet studies that use the AMV as regressor or explanatory factor continue to be published despite the lack of an unequivocal physical underpinning (Lewis and Curry 2018;…”
About the impact of the North Atlantic on the climate of the earth:
“The results are supported by another simple exercise in which NA SSTs are weighted by the surface area of the AMV/NAVI region, divided by the NHem surface area. This way, the fractional fingerprint of the AMV on NHem temperatures can be inferred.”
If you want to know something about the present knowledge about the AMV read this: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019RG000644
IMO the Haustein paper will generate some rumble in the next future.

Some 252 million years ago the super continent Pangea was surrounded by the world ocean Panthalassa. It was a time that saw the extinction of 90% of marine and 70% of terrestrial species. The causes are seen through a glass darkly – but organisms have both hot and cold physiological limits.

“Tolerances of marine animals to warming and O2 loss are physiologically related and can be represented in a single metric: the ratio of temperature-dependent O2 supply and demand rates. This ratio, termed the Metabolic Index (F), measures the environmental scope for aerobic activity and is governed by ocean conditions as well as thermal and hypoxia sensitivity traits
that vary across species.”

We are at a time now when the populations of many 1000’s of charismatic – likable, large, well studied – organisms are crashing for many reasons. Since the 1970’s. This could well be a prelude to another mass extinction.

It is not difficult to find in climate data evidence of rapid change – or in science clues as to mechanisms. Dissolution of cloud or disruption of overturning circulation in a warmer climate for instance. As far as I can see climate may jump either way. That’s before we get to any implications for global hydrology. Even the much lauded greening will change terrestrial hydrology and biology.

We are at a time now when the populations of many 1000’s of charismatic – likable, large, well studied – organisms are crashing for many reasons. Since the 1970’s. This could well be a prelude to another mass extinction.

Tipping point ecology works for species on islands or last remaining pockets, it does not work on a global scale, do you really understand why the african elephant or the polar bear as a species are not endangered?

Extinctions and imperilment of fishes occur among diverse taxonomic groups, across regions, and in a variety of habitats.

280 taxa are endangered (E), i.e., in imminent (fewer than 50 years) danger of extinction, or extirpation (loss of populations) throughout most portions of a taxon’s range.

190 are threatened (T), or in imminent danger of becoming endangered.

230 are vulnerable (V), that is, in imminent danger of becoming threatened, which is comparable to a designation of “Special Concern” by many agencies and conservation organizations.

61 are presumed extinct (X), meaning a taxon that has not been observed for over 50 years. Two subcategories are included: Possibly Extinct (Xp), a taxon suspected to be extinct, as evidenced by more than 20 but less than 50 years since living representatives were observed, and Extirpated in Nature (Xn), where all populations in natural habitats are presumed eliminated but surviving individuals are maintained in captivity.”

But still the rates of mortality and recruitment determine population dynamics. The balance of mortality and recruitment changes with population abundance. For that reason science suggests that there are minimum viable populations.

The 100 years of ESM is quite readable so far. And throwing science out with the bathwater seems a bit overboard. There are limitations of a ‘dynamical core’ that are not attributable to a political fringe of either stripe – but there are uses for models. Even of a conceptual nature.

Oh it’s worse than that – opportunistic ensembles are fraud or delusion. I have been a hydrodynamic modeler since the 1980’s. Models have their uses. But I like to have a picture of how it all hangs together before engaging a ‘dynamic core’.

“In a GWPF video released today, Dr. Susan Crockford, a Canadian wildlife expert, exposes the manipulation of fact behind the controversial walrus story promoted in the Netflix documentary film series, ‘Our Planet’, that was released early last month.

One episode in the series contained a highly disturbing piece of footage of walruses bouncing off rocks as they fell from a high cliff to their deaths. Narrator Sir David Attenborough blamed the tragedy on climate change, insisting if it weren’t for lack of sea ice the animals would never have been on land in the first place. World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) used the sequence to suggest the walrus was “the new symbol of climate change”.

However, most of what Sir David told viewers was a fabrication. Careful investigation has revealed that the producers, with help from WWF, created a story that had elements of truth but which blatantly misrepresented others and contained some outright falsehoods.

Dr. Crockford explains why it is especially incorrect to claim that large numbers of walruses resting on land constitutes a sure sign of climate change.

“Enormous herds of Pacific walrus mothers and calves spend time on beaches in late summer and fall only when the overall population size is very large. Recent estimates suggest there are many more walruses now than there were in the 1970s, which is the last time similarly massive haulouts were documented. Huge herds of walruses resting on beaches are a sign of walrus population health, not evidence of global warming. That’s largely why the US Fish and Wildlife Service concluded in 2017 – the year the Netflix scene was filmed – that walrus do not require Endangered Species Act protection.”

They are playing politics. This guy is an Irish gypsy fold song musician. He has just put out an English song bird collection. With such numbers some of these song birds seem already doomed. He is playing politics too. It is Sam Lee – the face of Extinction Rebellion. None of it matters to the birds.

And this problem of crashing wildlife populations is global. Even in the Australia I know. An Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment found that riparian zones are declining over 73% of Australia. There has been a massive decline in the ranges of indigenous mammals over more than 100 years. In the past 200 years, 22 Australian mammals have become extinct – a third of the world’s recent extinctions. Further decline in ranges is still occurring and is likely to result in more extinctions. Mammals are declining in 174 of 384 subregions in Australia and rapidly declining in 20. The threats to vascular plants are increasing over much of the Australia. Threatened birds are declining across 45% of the country with extinctions in arid parts of Western Australia. Reptiles are declining across 30% of the country. Threatened amphibians are in decline in southeastern Australia and are rapidly declining in the South East Queensland, Brigalow Belt South and Wet Tropics bioregions.

Our rivers are still carrying huge excesses of sand and mud. The mud washes out onto coastlines destroying seagrass and corals. The sand chokes up pools and riffles and fills billabongs putting intense pressure on inland, aquatic ecologies. In 1992, the Mary River in south east Queensland flooded carrying millions of tonnes of mud into Hervey Bay. A thousand square kilometres of seagrass died off decimating dugongs, turtles and fisheries. The seagrass has grown back but the problems of the Mary River have not been fixed. The banks have not been stabilised and the seagrass could be lost again at any time. A huge excess of sand working its way down the river is driving to extinction the Mary River cod and the Mary River turtle. The situation in the Mary River is mirrored in catchments right across the country. Nationally, 50% of our seagrasses have been lost and it has been this way for at least twenty years.

Billions are being spent and more is needed to conserve land, water and reefs. It it all involves carbon sequestration in green. blue and soil environments. So why not make a risk a benefit.

“The tropopause is the boundary in the Earth’s atmosphere between the troposphere and the stratosphere.
Going upward from the surface, it is the point where air ceases to cool with height, and becomes almost completely dry. More formally, the tropopause is the region of the atmosphere where the environmental lapse rate changes from positive, as it behaves in the troposphere, to the stratospheric negative one. Following is the exact definition used by the World Meteorological Organization:
The boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere, where an abrupt change in lapse rate usually occurs. It is defined as the lowest level at which the lapse rate decreases to 2 °C/km or less, provided that the average lapse rate between this level and all higher levels within 2 km does not exceed 2 °C/km.”

The LNP need two more seats in the House of Representatives for a majority government. Of the 5 undecided – they are ahead in Boothby in South Australia and Wentworth in New South Wales. Counting resumes this morning. The Adani coal mine – coal for Indian energy – gave two wins in Queensland.

The climate vote remains significant with wins in Tasmania and Victoria.

The revived presence of United Australia and One Nation – right wing lunatics with about 3% of the vote each – muddied the polling waters but votes flowed from there to the LNP in the preferential voting system. The United Australia guy spent $80M on an election in which he promised to finally pay hundreds of sacked workers what they are owed. What I took away from my polling place was a sense of a swing to the LNP and that One Nation had the cutest young poll workers by far.

The win is a win for a moderate centrist government such as Australians always vote for.

The eastern Pacific is the most productive system on the planet as cold and nutrient rich water rises into the photic zone. It leads to booms and busts in populations by selectively influencing the survival of juveniles. Chinook salmon, chicks on the Peruvian coast, seal pups in Monterey Bay, etc.

Upwelling is limited by the depth of the thermocline – something determined in a couple of dynamics including polar annular mode modulation of flow in the Peruvian and Californian Currents. It is also the source of most decadal to millennial variability of climate – through changes in cloud cover – including most 20th century warming.

“But, as we are increasingly coming to understand, it is often not questions about science that are at stake in these discussions. The culturally potent idiom of the dispassionate scientific narrative is being employed to fight culture wars over competing social and ethical values.” Prin and Rayner, 2007, The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy

More than 10 years later and neither side are dissuaded from their idiomatic claims of little scientific substance, import or interest. Both sides seem divorced from reality. On one side everything is a tale of apocalypse with magical thinking that 100% wind and solar can save the day – along with transition to an anti-capitalist and undemocratic social utopia. Skeptics have lost the social and political impetus in a risk adverse polity and believe that they may still redeem the day with their crude and eccentric hypotheses.

The rest of us are concerned that the real objectives of humanity are not lost sight of. It is simple in principle to take the initiative on the broad front of population, development, energy technology, multiple gases and aerosols across sectors, land use change, conservation and restoration of agricultural lands and ecosystems and building prosperous and resilient communities. What we really want is much more clarity on effective policy responses – a focus on the real issues of global economic progress and environmental protection. Emissions of greenhouse gases or loss of biodiversity are far from intractable problems — but economic growth is the foundation of any practical measures. And the basis of that is economic freedom.

“What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible…Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide.” F. A. Hayek

“We ask EPA to determine that its 2009 GHG Endangerment Finding and supporting Technical Support Document (TSD) do not meet the requirements of the Information Quality Act. As discussed at the end of this document, EPA’s Inspector General found many of these deficiencies in a 2011 report to the agency. EPA’s response to those findings was inadequate, and those inadequacies are even more obvious in light of OMB’s latest guidelines.”

“EPA met statutory requirements for rulemaking and generally followed requirements and guidance related to ensuring the quality of the supporting technical information. Whether EPA’s review of its endangerment finding TSD met Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requirements for peer review depends on whether the TSD is considered a highly influential scientific
assessment. In our opinion, the TSD was a highly influential scientific assessment because EPA weighed the strength of the available science by its choices of
information, data, studies, and conclusions included in and excluded from the TSD. EPA officials told us they did not consider the TSD a highly influential scientific
assessment. EPA noted that the TSD consisted only of science that was previously peer reviewed, and that these reviews were deemed adequate under the Agency’s policy…

The primary scientific basis for EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare were assessments conducted by (1) the U.S. Global
Change Research Program (USGCRP) (formerly known as the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), (2) the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and (3) the National Research Council (NRC). EPA summarized the results of these and other assessments in a technical support document (TSD). ” https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/documents/20110926-11-p-0702.pdf

Will you ask 9 judges to rule whether it was a ‘highly influential scientific assessment’ or merely a rehash of highly influential scientific assessments? Either way it seems not pertinent to a case that has been lost in the court of public opinion.

The courts have already upheld the process used by the EPA to determine that GHG emissions can be regulated as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

In making their decisions, the courts didn’t rule on questions concerning the validity of the science, or the lack thereof — not directly anyway. Rather, they ruled on the question of EPA’s compliance with the procedures the agency must follow in developing and publishing an endangerment finding.

Climate activists inside and outside of the federal government haven’t gone nearly as far as the Clean Air Act would allow them to go in aggressively regulating America’s carbon emissions.

If a climate activist Democrat is elected president in 2020, will that situation change in 2021? Maybe, maybe not.

it is a fundamental factor that controls the former and presumably if there is a persistent or recurring position, will affect the latter.

“Summary of the Jet Stream and the weather it creates:
• The position of the jet stream over the UK determines the type of weather we experience.
• If the polar front jet is situated significantly to the south of the UK we will experience colder than average weather.
• If the polar front jet is situated to the north of the UK we will experience warmer than average weather.
• If the polar front jet is situated over the UK we will experience wetter and windier than average weather.
• If the polar front jet has a large amplification then cold air will travel further south than average and warm air will travel further north than average.
• The direction and angle of the jet stream arriving at the UK will determine what source of air (i.e. cold, dry, warm, wet, from maritime or continental sources) the UK experiences.’

Your link seems to go to a childrens weather web site. Perhaps it was the source of Gretas profound Knowledge :)

It doesn’t say the jet stream isn’t important .

The Met Office, New scientist and meteorologists generally seem to think the jet stream is of paramount importance in shaping our weather. The forecasts here often show the position of the jet stream and the manner in which it is drawing in high or low pressure systems into certain positions that will affect our weather..

A Climate-Change Drubbing In Australia
“If American Democrats want a warning about the consequences of embracing the Green New Deal, look no further than Saturday’s election shocker in Australia. The opposition center-left Labor Party had led in the polls for months but lost as voters rejected its move left on taxes, spending and above all on climate change.” –Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 20 May 2019

Tom Switzer: Australia’s Left Loses An Election It Was Sure To Win
The Wall Street Journal, 20 May 2019

Adrian Papst: Why The Australian Labor Party Suffered A Crushing Defeat
New Statesman, 19 May 2019

Around The World, Backlash Against Expensive Climate Change Policies
“As daily headlines become ever more shrill, hyping climate fears based on projections made by unverified climate models, the international public is becoming increasingly wary of the Chicken Little claims of impending climate doom. Voters in developed countries are saying “enough is enough” to high energy prices that punish the most vulnerable but do nothing to control the weather.” –H. Sterling Burnett, The Washington Examiner, 18 May 2019

“… in terms of GDP, the economy would be about $19 billion smaller in 2030, with cumulative losses over the decade of about $69bn. This is equivalent to a growth rate of 2.8 per cent a year, compared with 2.9 per cent under the base case.

In 2030 this scenario would also see about 78,000 less full-time equivalent jobs in the economy and a full-time wage of about $104,600 a year, compared with $106,400 in the base case, a reduction of 2 per cent in real wages. Under this option, Australia’s share of renewables would reach about 36 per cent and the wholesale electricity price would be $93/MWh, compared with $81/MWh in 2030.”

All this for no climate benefit.

“At the end of the day, the political process will determine the emissions reduction road that Australia takes, but in the meantime we need to inject some honesty into the debate about the true cost of achieving our targets.”

Brian Fisher is managing director of BAEconomics and has participated as a lead or convening lead author in three IPCC climate assessments.

Much of the rest is in ongoing energy efficiency gains, elimination of CFC’s’ and technology improvements. All of these have positive economic impacts.

There are both considerable environmental and productivity gains that leave both the country and the economy better off. They are low hanging, no regret fruit that makes sense for reasons other than climate change.

The renewables target is fully subscribed and incentives wind back to zero from next year. It is about 10% of my bill for some 7% generation. With about 7% hydro to supply peak evening loads. But it is widely recognised that there are physical and technology limits.

Brian Fisher thinks that it will cost to transition to low carbon electricity – and is willing to pay for it. As are most Australians. But ultimately only cost competitive low carbon energy will work globally. Very likely to be nuclear IMO.

Never mind that wind and solar—the focus of all “new energy economy” aspirations, including its latest incarnation in the Green New Deal—supply just 2 percent of global energy, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies. After all, it wasn’t long ago that only 2 percent of the world owned a pocket-sized computer. “New energy economy” visionaries believe that a digital-like energy disruption is not just possible, but imminent. One professor predicts that we will see an “Apple of clean energy.”

It bears noting that over the past decade, U.S. production of oil and natural gas has increased by 2,000 percent more than the combined growth of (subsidized) wind and solar. Shale technology has utterly transformed the global energy landscape. After a half-century of hand-wringing about import dependencies, America is now a major exporter. Now that’s a revolution.

No Mention of solar here but it’s just about the more recent revolution not the future.

IRI sees a continuation of El Niño through 2019. Somehow I see that as unlikely:

“SSTs in the tropical Pacific maintained a weak El Niño level during April and early May, while temperature anomalies of subsurface waters decreased markedly to just slightly above average. Some patterns in the atmosphere show weak El Niño conditions. Collective model forecasts show a continuation of at least weak El Niño-level SSTs lasting through 2019. The official CPC/IRI outlook, with an El Niño advisory, calls for an approximate 70% chance of El Niño continuing during Jun-Aug, decreasing to 55-60% for Sep-Nov.”https://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/enso/current/
May 20 update.

With Niño 3.4 at +0.67°C and little subsurface heat it looks like El Niño could be over in a couple of months.

CFAN will issue another ENSO forecast in June. Right now, the El Nino appears to be on its way out, signals are for the eastern pacific to continue to cool. Looks like El Nino Modoki for fall, but some La Nina signals are starting to appear.

So sorry, BoM has stolen my idea and they have postponed the demise of the current NOAA El Niño, which can easily last into the fall, and maybe into the 2020 winter.

…An active phase of the Madden-Julian Oscillation in the last fortnight weakened the trade winds and brought a small rise in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the central and western tropical Pacific Ocean and a drop in the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI). This has sustained the El Niño-like pattern in the Pacific. While a prolonged weakening of the trade winds could elevate El Niño chances once again, the majority of surveyed models suggest the tropical Pacific will cool to neutral levels during winter…. – May 28th update

That’s hilarious. You have no clue and BoM works with data and models, not reading internet comments.

I don’t know when neutral conditions will return. What I do know is that their models can’t be trusted, so what they say has little value.

Solar activity predicts Niña conditions starting by fall 2019 to summer 2020 according to my interpretation. Until then it doesn’t make much difference whether ENSO is neutral or weak Niño.

2019 is very likely to be a warm year, but on the low side of what the MetOffice predicted. The good news for you, given your climate worries, are that 2020 and 2021 are very likely to be cooler than 2019. Very likely Niña conditions and a continuation of below average solar activity will see to it.

Well, alarmists are notorious for believing they have all figured out. Humans are responsible for the change in climate through the release of GHGs according to them. That you believe you have ENSO figured out is not that far off.

Ah the hubris of modern climate scientists, so ignorant yet so certain. It is going to be a great joke.

I make no claims whatsoever to having ENSO figured out. Professor Curry made an essentially correct ENSO prediction last year, and she is making an update in June. I suspect it will fall in line with IRI: a continued weak El Niño into late 2019.

“The tropopause is the boundary in the Earth’s atmosphere between the troposphere and the stratosphere.
Going upward from the surface, it is the point where air ceases to cool with height, and becomes almost completely dry. More formally, the tropopause is the region of the atmosphere where the environmental lapse rate changes from positive, as it behaves in the troposphere, to the stratospheric negative one. Following is the exact definition used by the World Meteorological Organization:
The boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere, where an abrupt change in lapse rate usually occurs. It is defined as the lowest level at which the lapse rate decreases to 2 °C/km or less, provided that the average lapse rate between this level and all higher levels within 2 km does not exceed 2 °C/km.”

La Niña emerge as the thermocline in the eastern Pacific shoals allowing upwelling of cold subsurface water. This produces patches of cold sea surface temperature and high sea level pressure. High pressure cells create feddbacks that increase upwelling across the Pacific. The regions to watch for early signs of La Niña are off the coast of California and in the Humboldt Current off Peru.

There is warm water across the Pacific at the equator that is neither of the canonical ENSO events – or either type of Modoki.

It has been like this for more than a year. A minor La Niña followed an inconsequential El Niño. Hardly worth the candle.

But keep an eye on the coast off California and the region of the Humboldt Current off Peru, The transition to the next La Niña will be rapid and commonly occurs around this time of year.

Forget and Ferreira’s is the first framework that reconciles both the atmospheric and oceanic perspectives. Combining satellite data, which captures the intersection of the air and sea surface, with field data on what’s happening below the surface, the researchers created a three-dimensional representation of how heat transfers between the air, sea surface, and ocean columns.

Their results revealed a new perspective on ocean heat transport: that net ocean heat redistribution takes place primarily within oceanic basins rather than via the global seawater pathways that compose the great conveyor belt.

Progress can be made, however, through the decomposition
of plain OHT (OHT0) into an ‘effective’ OHT that balances heat
exchanges with the atmosphere (OHT∇) and a second term representing
internal ocean heat loops that do not immediately affect
Earth’s energy budget (OHTR,0). In mathematical terms, we carry
out a Helmholtz decomposition of OHT0 into divergent (OHT∇)
and rotational (OHTR,0) components. This decomposition is applied
to a state-of-the-art global, gridded data product (see Methods). An
important point is that OHT∇, unlike OHT0 or OHTR,0, is insensitive
to mass fluxes and the chosen ERL (0 °C, here). OHT∇ represents
the net effect of OHT as experienced by the atmosphere via air–sea
fluxes rather than seawater pathways.

As Forest and Ferreira say – heat is contained within basins with limited flow paths between basins. Through an open Arctic, in the Agulhas Current around South Africa, entrained in the Antarctic circumpolar current south of Australia and in flow through Drakes Passage and in throughflow between Australia and Indonesia.

The Pacific covers most of the global tropics and so gains most of the heat. This fact is not controversial. It is redistributed in great ocean gyres. These modes of ocean circulation have been mapped for navigation for centuries.

“The ocean plays an important role in redistributing heat within the evolving climate system1. Perhaps most importantly, it transports heat from the Equator, where oceans take up heat in excess, towards higher latitudes where heat gets released to the atmosphere. This is clearly seen in observational estimates of meridional ocean heat transport (OHT) integrated all the way around the Earth, which is directed poleward in both hemispheres2–4. However, interpretation of measurements can be more difficult when looking
at individual ocean basins and sections as seawater can loop around land masses in complicated ways without immediately affecting the atmosphere. This complexity has led to high uncertainties in regional OHT analyses5. Here we provide a framework to help reconcile previous estimates.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0333-7

The significance of Atlantic heat transport is its variability arising from variable deep water formation and associated major climatic feedbacks. Understanding is possible only rarely within a broad context developed with patience and intellectual discipline – in which review of assumptions plays a large part.

And no – an El Niño is not possible. It would require elevated water levels in the west to provide the energy required for water to surge eastward. Basic ENSO dynamics.

Wally’s ‘beast’ involves AMOC – that has major climatic feedbacks and influences the AMO. The Pacific state has some impact on surface temperature. Together they have major impacts on global hydrology and ecology.

Robert I Ellison: The Pacific covers most of the global tropics and so gains most of the heat. This fact is not controversial. It is redistributed in great ocean gyres. These modes of ocean circulation have been mapped for navigation for centuries.

Forget and Ferreira make a strong effort to disentangle energy transport from mass transport.

“Helmholtz decomposition states that a vector field (satisfying appropriate smoothness and decay conditions) can be decomposed as the sum of the form – grad Φ + curl A where Φ is a scalar field, called scalar potential, and A is a vector field, called a vector potential.” Wikipedia

In all this heat transport there is a rotational component in eddies and meanders with restricted air/sea interactions – and a meridional component where heat is transported north or south and lost to the sky.

Seen clearly in these Lagrangian black holes of the ocean spinning of South Africa in the Agulhas Current.

The outlooks are for cooling both of the Nino regions and also the Indian Ocean – unusual for them both to be cooling simultaneously, usually there is reciprocity between the east-central Pacific and the Indian Ocean.

Cold subsurface water is always present. The significance is in shoaling of the thermocline in the eastern Pacific. This results in cold water upwelling and consequent positive feedbacks to La Nina ‘normal’ conditions.

The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is an index of SST off equatorial Africa and north-west of Australia. The Indian Ocean is currently warmer off Africa and cooler near Australia – a positive IOD leading to drier winter and spring conditions in the southern regions of Australia.

“The cool stretch will add on to what has already been a cool month in the Southwest,” according to AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brian Thompson. “Temperatures are already running about 4 degrees Fahrenheit below average for May in Las Vegas and Phoenix.”

And the height of the trropopause is related to the temperature of the air below it. No surprises there. But at least you have discarded the annual average geopotential height graphic that showed why sea ice wouldn’t melt this summer apparently.

The comments on the week in review list were unusually informative, polite, and added a lot of information to the list. This is in violation of Internet Rule 4b, which specifies that all comment threads must include disagreements, and those disagreements must end with hostile comments that include character attacks, such as questioning the mental abilities of an “opponent”. In fact, the thread is not officially closed until one commenter compares the other to Hit-ler (Rule 5a), or even worse, to Donald Trump. Please do not behave in this polite manner again, because it might spread to the rest of the internet, and we would not want that !

“The global-mean temperature trends associated with GSW are as large as 0.3 °C per 40 years, and so are capable of doubling, nullifying or even reversing the forced global warming trends on that timescale.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-018-0044-6

“Key findings are that at the 95% confidence level, no consistent or compelling evidence (yet) exists that recent rates of rise are higher or abnormal in the context of the historical records available across the United States (Watson 2016) Europe(Watson 2017) nor is there any evidence that geocentric rates of rise are above the global average. It is likely a further 20 years of data will distinguish whether recent increases are evidence of the onset of climate change–induced acceleration.”